He broke the controlling power of our sin that put Him in the Cross
He showed Himself the Lord of new life because death could not hold Him
He invites us to believe in Him, receive Him in our hearts and know the joy of this new life in Him.
The Queen, in her Easter message, said this:
“We know that coronavirus will not overcome us. As dark as death can be – particularly for those suffering with grief – light and life are greater. May the living flame of the Easter hope be a steady guide as we face the future.”
“The discovery of the risen Christ on the first Easter Day gave his followers new hope and fresh purpose, and we can all take heart from this.”
View from a human perspective
For Jesus to have endured without retaliation the suffering of the whipping post and the Cross is instructive. A righteous man, falsely accused, who did not abuse His captors but forgave them…. So this, our sense of reason tells us, is the example for us to try to live up to. And to keep on trying harder… Perhaps this is what we should do in the present pandemic?
To do that we have to keep looking back. We find in the historical account a high call to live up to. Is it even possible? Should our worship mean solemnly revisiting a sense of failure, that our lives never measure up?
A lot of Christian religion tells it that way. It emphasises the failure, but avoids getting to the joy, which might be frivolous.
“Enthusiasm,” an 18th century bishop lectured John Wesley, “is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing indeed.” Wesley listened to God instead and continued with his enthusiastic, Spirit-led ministry. He told ordinary non-religious people of the freedom and joy that came from being born again — a kind of resurrection — into new life with Jesus as our Lord. The revival he pioneered probably saved the country from revolution in the late 1700s.
God Is good! Wesley knew God in a persona;l way through a life-changing encounter he had roughly this time of year, in 1738. And Wesley knew full well that God did not leave us, in a cycle of failure, our inability to break out of the control of sin. He didn’t leave us struggling to do all the right things and none of the wrong things and live right by Him. He doesn’t want us to live a checklist. The way people should relate to God and each other that He gave Moses had been turned into the most complicated of legalistic structures. Of course, it didn’t work, because man always tries to create an ordered, repeatable system which we can understand and control. And as Jesus taught, it doesn’t work that way. It works His way.
God never intended that we should turn Jesus into a system, a set of rules and sanctions, a religion. The destroying of the temple curtain in the earthquake that followed the crucifixion (a few decades later, the wrecking of the massive temple) ended for all time the need of a special priestly order, standing between men and God. Everyone was free to know Him through Jesus.
View from heaven
The resurrection of Jesus tells us we must not go there again.
Our God is a living, understanding, providing Father who wants us to enjoy day-by-day fellowship with Him. Why? Not just for our well-being but for His pleasure! He created us for fellowship! He wants each one of us to know this closeness, to experience His love, and He has made a way for us to overcome the crippling, blinding disability of sin that separates us from it.
How? How could we do enough good to put this historical handicap even a little bit more right?
On the day when we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, this is the headline.
We can’t. He did — and is alive and with us.
The law and the ordered, prescriptive approach of religion could only ever get us partly aligned with God. It was a rough measure, like the blaring of an aircraft cockpit warning, that told us if we were off track, but useless for helping us to line up.
The religious approach is only good at the warnings. It frightens us into pulling this way and that, striving to stop the spin and doing the exact opposite of what we should do to fly straight and level. Most aircraft stabilise in level flight with hands off the controls.
God had to help us get our attitude and alignment right. He has done this for us — but we have to let Him. We have to let go of the controls of our life and let Him have them. Only then do we make room for the enabling Saviour, who was dead but is now very much alive and with us.
The resurrection of Jesus is about Him being with us in life – the meaning of the name Immanuel.
Jesus appeared, first to an outsider among the disciples, Mary of Magdala, not the one with the best CV, but the one who felt most forgiven and accepted.
Then He came to the others, in a number of occasions, eating with them, being real with them, reminding them of all the Scriptures which pointed to Him.
This new, resurrected life defines the Way of Jesus we follow. We must resist all temptations to reduce this to a repeatable form and a constructed system of our understanding. That is what religions consist of, because they give us what we think we can understand and a familiar route we think we can follow — on our own.
Wrong! This new way is WITH Jesus, led now by His Spirit, unpredictable but always life giving.
There are a lot of world religions. They cause a lot of world conflicts, and harm those who don’t fit in with them. Knowing Jesus is a different thing all together.
Jesus came back to life, to give us life and life in abundance, in Him. Where all the news is about lock down, and terrible mortality rates, He is saying to us: “Look UP’ I AM the Way, the reality and the life.“
What is God saying, in this pandemic?
Jesus proved, by being seen as a flesh-and-blood person following His resurrection (not a ghost), that there is life after death. This pandemic is a prompting to all of us to turn to God! Is God calling you to take the step whereby you will come to know Him personally, receive His assurance that you are forgiven and have an eternal life with Him, and be empowered to live, pray and know His peace even in difficult times such as these?
At this season of Holy Week and Good Friday especially, we tell the story that we know so well, and find so difficult in the telling. But how well do we tell the story of what happened spiritually, behind the events recorded for us? We hear phrases like ‘divine exchange’ and the Saviour ‘dying in our place’, but do we understand it? We may have prayed the prayer asking Jesus into our life – and repeated it probably – but are we living in the fullness of it? Here is an attempt to explain the seven key blessings for us that come from a cursed and horrible execution. These have become the main strands of our new life, the eternal life secured for us by Jesus which starts now.
1. Our sins and due punishment were taken by Jesus on Himself
Jesus “carried our sins up to the Cross” – the literal meaning of “bore our sin” which Peter quotes from Isaiah:
“He himself BORE OUR SINS” in his body on the Cross, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by His wounds you HAVE BEEN healed.” 1 Peter 2:24. From Isaiah: “The Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all… He poured out His life unto death and was numbered with the transgressors. For He BORE the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” Isaiah 53:6, 12.
In a way which is hard for us to grasp, the moral weight of our sin was laid on Jesus, who carried it – our personal sin included – to the Cross
2. The reasons for accusation cancelled
The devil’s name is ‘accuser’ and he never loses an opportunity of mounting an opportunity to accuse, whether he has a legal right to do so or not. But that legal right was taken away the moment Jesus gave up His life. The sacrifice to end all sacrifices was made. The price for us to be forgiven and brought back into relationship with God, had been paid. The sense of guilt, not being good enough, not accepted, under condemnation was broken, because the charges against us were cancelled:
When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the Cross. Colossians 2:13-14
Why do we still feel accused, feel condemned? We need to do two things. First, we make sure we have made Jesus our Lord and our lives are hidden in His – in effect, we went to the Cross with Him, died and then found new life in Him, as He did on the third day in the resurrection. Second, we tell the accuser he has no legal right to say those things! Speak out loud and remind him of all that happened on the Cross, and who he is trying to accuse now.
3. Our healing enabled, our reconciliation with God secured
By His wounds we HAVE BEEN healed, 1 Peter 2:24b. This is a healing of spirit, soul and body.
When Adam and Eve went their own way in the garden, following the incitement of the devil, Genesis 3, it caused a fracture, a wound, in the relationship with God. By Jesus’ action on the Cross, this fracture is mended and healed. As a consequence – the separation of spirit, soul and body is more of a human logical perspective than a heavenly one, and Hebrew thought sees much more integration – we can pray for and expect healing from every kind of affliction which impacts God’s perfect design.
4. Jesus pronounced His mission completed
When He had received the drink, Jesus said, “It is finished.” With that, He bowed his head and gave up his spirit. John 19:30.
He had come to be “God with us”, the full representation of God in human form. “If you have seen Me, you have seen the Father…” John 14:9-10. He had also come to defeat the devil: And having DISARMED the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the Cross. Colossians 2:15.
The final battle is yet to come. Meanwhile, we have an active and vindictive enemy, who has power, and especially the power to cause fear. However, having power, and having power over us, are two different things. In Jesus’ last words: “It is finished!” we can tell him about the blood (below). We can tell him he is a defeated enemy
5. Jesus gave up His life – the blood
And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, He gave up his spirit. Matthew 27:50. Jesus has become, Himself, the perfect blood sacrifice for us.
How much more, then, will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God! Hebrews 9:14, read in the context of Hebrews 9:7-15.
The price of our being redeemed, set free from our sin obligation, is more than any amount of silver or gold can purchase. It has been paid for by Christ’s blood: For you know that it was not with perishable things such as silver or gold that you were redeemed from the empty way of life handed down to you from your ancestors, but with the precious blood of Christ, a lamb without blemish or defect. 1 Peter 1:18-19. The following verse tells us it was always planned that way.
6. The original covenants with Abraham and Moses for the Jewish nation, now became a new covenant for all who trust Jesus with their lives
At the moment of Christ’s death, a spiritual shift occurred — with signs accompanying. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. Matthew 27:51-52.
The massive temple curtain dividing off the holy of holies, where only the High Priest could go and only once a year, was destroyed. And with it the order of priesthood. Now, in Jesus, any believer can come into the presence of God and enjoy a relationship with the God who we call ‘Father’. This is a new kind of relationship where there is no need for an in-between person and no need for the rituals because Christ Himself has become our Great High Priest and called us all into a shared priesthood of all believers, where our lives are the spiritual sacrifices through us showing that we love Jesus, 1 Peter 2:5. This new and personal relationship a new and far better covenant than the one established by Moses and limited to Jews under the law.
In this new covenant the ‘law’ or the way of living that pleases God is something that the Holy Spirit leads us in – as Jeremiah said hundreds of years earlier, it is written on our hearts, Jer. 31:31 and 33. It is a new and better covenant, Hebrews 8:6-13 and the in-between person, or mediator, is none other than Jesus Himself. For this reason Christ is the mediator of a new covenant, that those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance — now that He has died as a ransom to set them free from the sins committed under the first covenant. Hebrews 9:15, see also Hebrews 12:24.
This is a huge benefit and huge shift. Keeping the law was a complicated business, fraught with failure. Living for God, enabled and empowered by His Holy Spirit, is joyful and hopeful. Under the Old Covenant the law proved that man could not live righteously before God, and penalties were required. Under the New Covenant we literally receive constant coaching in how to live unselfishly and well, a fellowship of doing life together, with God and with other believers.
7. And the curse over us because of our sin was broken.
A curse in the Bible is the opposite of blessing. While blessing is a predisposition of well-being and in the broadest sense, prosperity, a curse is the opposite. It is not God’s hand on us, but the enemy’s hand against us. However, at the Cross, Jesus died not only the most horrendous and painful death imaginable, but also the most shameful. Roman crucifixion reserved for the lowest and most vile class of criminal and everything from the procession with the victim forced, like a slave, to carry the heavy cross bar, to the public and lengthy execution, served as a pillory of shame and warning to others. For a Jew is was especially shaming, as Peter reminds us in his choice of word for ‘cross’: “He himself bore our sins” in his body on the CROSS, so that we might die to sins and live for righteousness; “by his wounds you have been healed.” 1 Peter 2:24
Similarly, in Acts: The God of our ancestors raised Jesus from the dead – whom you killed by hanging him on a CROSS. Acts 5:30. The word could be used for tree, beam, or wooden construction. Jewish readers in particular would be reminded of Deuteronomy 21:22-23“…Anyone who is hung on a pole is under God’s curse.” Paul quotes this and explains the divine exchange that Jesus made for us: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.” Galatians 3:13.
Where there is the sense that the enemy’s hand is against us — chronic or unexplained sickness, ongoing and irrational difficult — we might need to make a firm declaration stating that we are in Christ, and Christ has been made a curse for us, and therefore so this ground for oppression is removed.
In Jesus’ words earlier: To the Jews who had believed Him, Jesus said, “If you hold to My teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will SET YOU FREE… If the Son sets you free, you will be free, you will be free indeed. John 8:31-32 and 36.
Giving your life to Jesus, as He gave His life for you
So much was accomplished for us in those hours of torture and abandonment on the Cross. But to be free, to live in the benefit of Jesus’ shed blood, healed, redeemed accepted and free from condemnation, we need to be among “those who had believed Him“, above. Giving your life to Jesus means accepting the exchange in which He gave His life, lit early and painfully, for us. Our acceptance of that fact is our intentionally giving the charge of our lives to the Saviour, accepting what He has done for us that we could not do or ourselves, and calling Him our Lord.
This message was given by Rev. Ifor Williams, a respected minister in Brecon (many would know him through the Brecon Beacons Filling Station). It speaks directly to the present pandemic, and the anxiety that affects all of us for a variety of different reasons. There is something in this Scripture and in this message that we can ask for, and receive, as Ifor explains very clearly.
Palm Sunday, April 6, 2020
Our Palm Sunday reading is from Luke 19:29-42. Why not pause and pray before you read further, and ask God to speak into your heart and your life. God’s word is not irrelevant to our daily life, and today, when so many people are deeply worried about their health, their families and friends, their jobs and incomes, their present and their future, let’s pray that God will speak peace into our hearts in the midst of the coronavirus storm that is raging across the world.
Image credit: United Methodist Church, Western Jurisdiction
Luke 19:29-42
29-31 As [Jesus] approached Bethphage and Bethany at the hill called the Mount of Olives, He sent two of his disciples, saying to them, “Go to the village ahead of you, and as you enter it, you will find a colt tied there, which no one has ever ridden. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ say, ‘The Lord needs it.’”
32-34 Those who were sent ahead went and found it just as he had told them. As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?” They replied, “The Lord needs it.”
35-38 They brought it to Jesus, threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it. As He went along, people spread their cloaks on the road. When He came near the place where the road goes down the Mount of Olives, the whole crowd of disciples began joyfully to praise God in loud voices for all the miracles they had seen: “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” “Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!
39-42 Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples!” “I tell you,” he replied, “if they keep quiet, the stones will cry out.” As he approached Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it and said, “If you, even you, had only known on this day what would bring you peace — but now it is hidden from your eyes.”
The inner peace the donkey recognised
Thirty six years ago, in 1984, Penny (my wife) and I took our two young children to a local agricultural show. There was a special challenge in the main ring. The challenge was to ride a young donkey, and stay on its back for 60 seconds. The prize for anyone succeeding was £5. That year I took out a mortgage on a bungalow which was valued at £21,500. Today it would be worth ten times that amount. Using the same equation, the £5 prize money would be worth £50 today. Not surprisingly there was a long line of eager hopefuls queuing up to have a go at winning the prize money. Some stayed on the donkey’s back for 10 seconds, some 20, 30, even 40 seconds, but no-one managed to stay on for a whole minute. Sixty seconds is a long time on a donkey that’s never been ridden before.
Have you ever wondered why Jesus instructed the disciples to fetch him a young donkey (a colt is a young male donkey) which had never been ridden? Most of us would have ended up on the floor in a matter of seconds, yet Jesus rode this young donkey into Jerusalem, through streets crowded with thousands of people shouting praises to God, and waving palm branches right under his nose. And the donkey carried Jesus without even fidgeting! How did Jesus do it?
The answer is that Jesus was full of inner peace, and the donkey knew it. The sort of inner peace which calms others, and calms nervous animals, and can even calm a raging storm. Once, when Jesus and His disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee in a small boat, a fierce storm sprang up, and the disciples, experienced fishermen among them, thought they were going to drown. Where was Jesus? Asleep in the bow of the boat. How could He sleep in the middle of a raging storm? Because He was full of inner peace. When He stood up and said to the storm, “Peace, be still!” He spoke the peace that was in Him, the peace in His mind, heart, soul and body, into the storm. And the storm immediately died down, and the disciples were afraid.
For all of us who have fears and worries about coronavirus, may God speak his peace into our hearts and minds even now.
When Jesus came into Jerusalem, He came to die on the Cross and then rise from the dead. He came to take our sin upon Himself, and in so doing take our sin away from us. When our sin is taken away we have peace with God, which manifests itself in a deep inner peace. Paul says in Romans 5:1, “Since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”
When Jesus came to Jerusalem He wept over the city, and said in effect, “If only you could see what would bring you peace — but you just can’t see it.”
What would bring them (and us) peace is to acknowledge Jesus Christ as King and Lord in our lives, and then to trust Him daily. Jesus had entered Jerusalem many times before, but when the crowds saw Him coming on a young donkey, they remembered the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9, “Rejoice… Shout, daughter of Jerusalem! See your king comes to you, righteous and having salvation, gentle and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey.”
A king riding a donkey was not only prophetic, it was highly symbolic. In those days if a king came in war, he would ride on a war horse. If he came in peace he would ride on a donkey. For Jesus to ride into Jerusalem on a young donkey symbolised that He was indeed the long awaited Messiah, the Christ, the Saviour promised from long ago.
The crowd recognised the symbolism immediately, and cried out “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord!” The crowd also recognised He was coming in peace to save them and cried “Hosanna!” which means ‘save us’. Yet despite their excitement and enthusiasm, the crowd didn’t get it. They thought the occupying Roman army was what they needed saving from, and they thought Jesus was going to lead a revolution and drive out the Romans and so bring peace and prosperity to Jerusalem.
Within a week, when it became evident that wasn’t His intention, they were crying, “Crucify him!”
Today it’s not the Roman army that is the foremost problem in peoples’ minds, it’s coronavirus. If only we could find a vaccination or somehow get rid of coronavirus we would be safe. Or so we think. We could start repairing the mess of the last few months, and hopefully see peace and prosperity return. The message of Palm Sunday is that if we want real inner peace, and the prosperity that comes from a just and fair society, then we need to acknowledge Jesus as King, as Lord and Saviour in our hearts and lives. Only then will we find that deep inner peace, the peace of God which transcends all understanding.
On Palm Sunday Jesus presents Himself as the Prince of Peace and the King of kings. The king who comes in peace to bring peace to those who accept Him and trust Him. Jesus comes to you today on a donkey. God comes to you in Jesus, humble and gentle, and says, ‘Will you accept Me as your King? Will you believe what I have done for you on the Cross and in the Resurrection? Will you trust Me, even in the midst of coronavirus, when you worry for your health, your family, your income, your future? “Seek first the kingdom of God” – accept Christ as your King and acknowledge Him in all your ways – “and all these things will be given you.”
Don’t just get excited and wave palms on Palm Sunday. Pause, be still, give him your heart, and acknowledge Jesus as your King. Receive the peace of God into your heart, the peace of knowing that God is on the throne — and then turn to a world full of anxiety and worry, and speak peace into the storm.
Dry and lifeless, yet able to be restored: Image credit: Ian Greig
Read Ezekiel 37:1-14
Ezekiel in a vision was told to ‘speak forth, in faith’ to dry, dead bones – which then came alive. With a relationship through Jesus, we can hear God’s call and respond to it with our words, backed up by heaven. We can speak “life” and bring change to situations the Lord shows us.
1-3 The hand of the Lord was on me, and He brought me out by the Spirit of the Lord and set me in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me back and forth among them, and I saw a great many bones on the floor of the valley, bones that were very dry. He asked me, “Son of man, can these bones live?”
I said, “Sovereign Lord, You alone know.”
4-6 Then He said to me, “Prophesy [speak forth in faith] to these bones and say to them, ‘Dry bones, hear the word of the Lord! This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life. I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’ ”
What’s the message for us today?
Resuscitation and ventilation are words we are hearing a lot at during this current epidemic. Doctors and nurses must be feeling “harassed and helpless”, in Jesus’ words, because very poorly and infectious respiratory patients need a lot of hospital time and skill.
Jesus’ words are in Matthew 9:35-36 NIV and they are in the context of the Lord’s compassion for those struggling with sickness:
Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When He saw the crowds, He had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.
We are not without a shepherd. We have Jesus, God’s Son and by our choice, our Saviour, who is full of compassion, and whose rule, or kingdom, is the very opposite of epidemic sickness, fear and hopelessness. And in Jesus we have His Holy Spirit in us – the power that raised Jesus from the dead, the power to bring life and hope.
The fear all around us today, is that death is stalking us and that we have no answers. But that’s a lie: we look to a God who sent His Son as Saviour to conquer death, and to offer us new life in Him.
We can address that fear thought and name it for what it is. “Fear, I speak you as one who is in Christ Jesus. You do not rule me – He does. You are a lying thought, sent by the father of lies, and I stop you right there. My shepherd is the Prince of Peace and the Victor of the Cross and so I disarm you and banish you now, to go to His feet. I call down life and peace to occupy the ground that was held by fear, and to hold that ground for the Lord of life and peace. Amen.”
Ezekiel saw at first a picture of hopelessness. He saw the bones of the defeated army of his ancestors and the reason for his exile. It was not a nice picture. But God doesn’t leave him there — He instructs him to do something about that picture, to change it.
He is to speak over the bones, to literally speak life — physical and spiritual life — into them. Today, we have a similar role. To use our words of faith to bring God’s kingdom order, especially where the enemy’s disorder is staring us in the face.
Our God is the definition of love. He is also a giver of life, and wants to draw us in to partner with Him, as He did with Ezekiel.
• What is the good news here?
We may feel harassed and helpless, but we are NOT sheep without a shepherd – Jesus is our shepherd and that gives us confidence. And equips us to act.
• What is our take-away?
You may have made that choice many years ago, but you can tell Jesus again today that You want Him to be your shepherd and Saviour – and your voice of truth against all the lies and fears trying to dominate your thinking. His life in you makes you a lifegiver!
Ezekiel, in his vision, had to trust God and do what He said. Are we prepared to do that?
Ezekiel was shown a picture of complete hopelessness. He was challenged to confront that picture and see it with God’s eyes. What is God saying to us about how we see the present epidemic and its sufferers?
What is the “word of the Lord” i.e. what is the Holy Spirit saying about the “dead bones” of national faith and our spiritual awakening to see this frightening epidemic situation from God’s perspective?
